WILLACY EXECUTED, FAIRFAX KILLS HIS WIFE, HEUERMANN CONFESSES AT HOME

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher. Thursday, April twenty third, twenty twenty six. This is Daily Crime and Justice. Here is what we have to walk through today. Yesterday evening at six fifteen Eastern time, inside a room at Florida State Prison in Stark, the state of Florida, ended the life of a man named Chadwick Scott Willisey. He was fifty eight years old. Thirty six and a half years ago, during a lunch break he took from whatever his life was. He broke into the home of his neighbor, a woman named Marley Sather. She came home from her job on her lunch hour and found him in her house.

0:49 What he did to her in the next hour is one of the worst things I'm going to describe on this show this year. She had buried her husband seven weeks earlier. Her son John sat a few feet from the glass last night and watched the man who killed his mother take his last breath. Then we have to go to Annandale, Virginia. A week ago tomorrow, just after midnight, a sixteen year old boy named Cameron Fairfax picked up the phone and called nine one one because he had just found his mother on the floor of his basement with what he thought were stab wounds in her shirt. They were not stab wounds, they were bullet holes. His father, the former Lieutenant Governor of Virginia justin Fairfax, had shot his wife several times in the basement and then walked upstairs to the primary bedroom and shot himself. His fourteen year old sister was in the house too, and tonight Peacock releases the fourth and final episode of its documentary series The Gilgo Beach Killer House of Secrets. In it, the ex wife of Rex Hoyerman, a woman named Asa Eleerrop, describes the moment she looked her husband of twenty seven years in the eye and asked him, addressing him formally as mister Heyerman, how many of those women he killed?

2:06 He told her, He told her where he killed them, and he told her something that I am not going to get over for a while. Three stories. Buckle in, Let me tell you about September fifth, nineteen ninety. Marlus May Sather lived in Palm Bay, Florida. She was in her mid fifties. She had three children, five grandchildren. Eventually five great grandchildren would follow. She was, by her family's account, a beautiful and loving woman who had just lost her husband to cancer in July of that year, seven weeks before the afternoon I'm about to describe, she buried the man she had built her life with. She was, in her family's words, a new widow, trying to take one day at a time. On September fifth, she went to work at lunchtime. She drove home the way people do, a half hour break in the middle of the day, a sandwich, a quiet house that was supposed to be her lunch. Instead, she walked into her home and found a man named Chadwick Willisey inside it. Willisey lived in the neighborhood. Whatever the exact nature of their relationship, on that afternoon, he was inside her house, burglarizing it, and she walked in on him. What happened in the next hour was methodical. It was not a panic response. It was not a man who swung wildly and fled. It was a sequence. First, he struck her in the head with a blunt object, hard enough to fracture her skull.

3:35 That would have been enough, with time and no medical attention, to kill her. It was not enough for Willisey Second, he bound her hands and her ankles with wire and with tape. Her skull was already fractured. She was either unconscious or she was barely conscious, and he took the time to tie her up. Third, he attempted to strangle her with a telephone cord. This did not work. She was still alive. Fourth, and I want you to hear me carefully on this, he doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. The autopsy later determined that the cause of Marlus Sather's death was smoke inhalation. Do you understand what that means. It means that when he lit the fire, she was still breathing. She inhaled the smoke.

4:24 The fire killed her, not the blow of the head, not the strangulation attempt, the fire. She was alive when he lit her, and she died from breathing. In what he did to her after he finished, he stole her car, He stole other items from her home. He took her ATM card and used it to pull cash out of her account, and then he went back to whatever he was doing with his Afternoon, when Marley didn't come back from lunch, her employer called her family. Her son in law went over to check on her. That is who found her. Willis was arrested. He was tried. In nineteen ninety one. A jury convicted him of first degree murder, burglary, robbery, and arson. The jury voted nine to three to recommend death.

5:11 The judge imposed the death sentence. In nineteen ninety four, the Florida Supreme Court threw out that sentence on a procedural issue. The trial judge had failed to allow defense attorneys a full chance to rehabilitate a juror during selection, so they did the whole sentencing phase again in nineteen ninety five. The second jury voted eleven to one for death. The judge sentenced him to death for the second time, and then he sat on death row for thirty years. Yesterday, April twenty second, twenty twenty six, he woke up in his cell at Florida State Prison at five in the morning. The Department of Corrections says he was compliant through the day.

5:51 His last meal was chicken, tater tots, ice cream, and pie. He was visited by his mother, two of his sisters, and a cousin. He did not meet with a spiritual advisor. The United States Supreme court denied his final appeal yesterday afternoon without comment. At six o'clock last night, they began administering a three drug protocol, a sedative, a paralytic, and a drug that stops the heart. At six point fifteen, he was pronounced dead. His last words were apologies to his family and friends, a message of encouragement to his words his brothers on the row, and a statement directed at Marley Sather's family. He said quote, I hope this brings you peace. If it does, that's good, but this is not right. Sitting in the witness room was John Sather, Marlaus's only son. He watched Willisey die. The family released a statement afterward. None of them spoke to reporters. The statement said they had waited thirty six and a half years for justice for their mom. It said their mother should be remembered as a beautiful and loving daughter, wife, mother of three, grandmother of five, great grandmother of five, aunt, cousin and friend. And it said I am reading this directly that she was a new widow trying to take one day at a time. We miss her so much every day. Here's the context Florida wants you to hold in your head about this execution. It is the fifth the state has carried out in twenty twenty six, five

7:23 executions in four months. Last year, Governor Ron DeSantis oversaw nineteen executions, more in a single year than any Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in nineteen seventy six. The previous record was eight set in twenty fourteen. Dessanta's more than doubled it. Another execution is scheduled in Florida on April thirtieth, a man named James Ernest Hitchcock, seventy years old, convicted of beating and choking his thirteen year old niece to death. That will be the sixth We are barely a third of the way through the year. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. I have genuine discomfort with capital punishment as a matter of principle. I have concerns about how it gets applied, who gets condemned, who gets mercy, and how often the system has been wrong.

8:13 Those concerns are real, and I don't pretend otherwise. And I also hold this in the same hand. A woman came home on her lunch break weeks after her husband died of cancer and the man who was robbing her house fractured her skull, tied her up, tried to choke her to death with a phone cord, couldn't get it done, poured gasoline on her and lit her on fire while she was still breathing. And she died breathing in the smoke of what he was doing to her. That is not a mistake. That is a choice. That is a sequence of choices over the course of an hour by a man who could have stopped at any single step and didn't. I'm not going to sit here and tell you what Marle's family should feel. They told us this morning what they feel six and a half years of waiting, and they are asking for privacy. Whatever comfort this gives them is not mine to judge. But I am going to say her name, because last night everyone was saying his.

9:12 Marley's May Sather, new widow, mother of three, grandmother of five, killed on her lunch break in nineteen ninety by a man who finished the job, took her car and used her ATM card. Someone should have been able to say her name a lot sooner than thirty six and a half years later. Marley Sather say her name just after midnight last Thursday. The morning of April sixteenth, a sixteen year old boy in Annandale, Virginia picked up the phone and dialed nine one one. His name is Cameron Fairfax.

9:59 His mother, Doc Karina Fairfax, is a dentist. His father, Justin Fairfax, is the former Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. That night, Cameron told the dispatcher that his father might have stabbed his mother. He said his mother was lying on the ground bleeding. He said he could see holes in her shirt. He said he didn't know where his father was. The holes in her shirt were not stab wounds, they were bullet holes. Fairfax County officers arrived within minutes. In the unfinished basement of the home, they found doctor Karina Fairfax, forty nine years old, deceased. She had been shot multiple times. Upstairs, in the primary bedroom, they found Justin Fairfax, forty seven years old, dead of what the medical examiner would rule a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The firearm was with him. Cameron was in the house. His fourteen year old sister, Carris was in the house. Neither of them was physically harmed. Victim services and relatives took custody of them that morning. Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis called it in his press conference later that day what it was a murder suicide amid a messy divorce. I want to stop here for a second, because this is not a small story. Justin Fairfax was the second most powerful elected official in the Commonwealth of Virginia for four years.

11:21 He ran for governor in twenty twenty one. He was considered at one point a rising star in national democratic politics. And the way he died, and more importantly, the way his wife died, is going to tell you something about what was happening behind the door of a suburban house on Guinevere Drive. For a long time, Fairfax was a federal prosecutor before he entered politics. He was elected lieutenant governor of Virginia in twenty seventeen and sworn in in January twenty eighteen. In early twenty nineteen, during the Ralph Northam blackface scandal, Fairfax was briefly in line to become governor if Northam recon That was the moment when two women came forward independently and accused him of sexual assault.

12:07 Fairfax categorically denied both allegations. He said the encounters were consensual, He was never criminally charged, the allegations were never resolved in a courtroom or any formal proceeding, and then he ran for governor anyway in twenty twenty one. He finished fourth in the Democratic primary. His political career did not recover. What his wife was dealing with behind the front door of that Annandale house is something we are only now learning about because she wrote it down in a divorce filing in July of twenty twenty five, which is now public record. Serena Fairfax filed for divorce last summer. In the court filing, she alleged that her husband was an alcoholic.

12:48 She called him, and I'm quoting the petition here, a deadbeat. She said the dictionary definition of that word was accurate as applied to him. She said he had defaulted on the mortgage. She said he had stopped paying household bills. She said he was drinking heavily and locking himself in his home office and only emerging to get food or to smoke cigarettes. She described the house as being filled with empty wine bottles, trash, and piles of dirty laundry, and she alleged that in twenty twenty two, he had taken money that was supposed to be going to their children's horseback riding lessons and used it to buy a handgun. The judge handling the divorce case noted something important in the record. Fairfax did not dispute these allegations. He didn't deny them, he didn't contest them. He sat in that courtroom while his wife's lawyer put the allegations into the file, and he said nothing. The couple had separated in June of twenty twenty four, but they stayed living in the same house. They had separate bedrooms. They had two teenage children who were watching all of this. And in January of this year, Fairfax called the police to allege that his wife had assaulted him inside the home. Officers investigated and determined the alleged assault had not occurred, no arrests, no charges. That is also in the file. Now we come to the last week of his life. A judge had issued an order on March thirtieth with a deadline for Fairfax to move out of the home. That deadline was coming up. Chief Davis said Fairfax was served paperwork

14:20 a court date in the days immediately before the shooting, Davis said, and I am quoting him, that it may have been a spark. A spark. I want to be careful with that word, because it does a lot of work. If you're not careful with it. It makes the paperwork sound like the cause, It makes the court order sound like the reason. There's a playbook for this. It's not a new one. Go look at the statistics on domestic murder and you will find this same shape over and over again. The moment of greatest danger for a woman in a violent domestic situation is when she tries to leave, when the filings go in, when the lawyer shows up, when the court date, is when she says I'm done, I am getting out, and I am taking the kids and the house and my life with me. That is when women get killed. That is not a spark. That is a predictable pattern that victim advocates have been describing for decades, and that Serena Fairfax was navigating while sleeping in a separate bedroom from her husband in the same house.

15:23 She did everything you would advise a woman in her situation to do. She filed, she got a lawyer, she put the allegations in the record. She got an order setting a deadline for him to leave. She stayed for the kids. She kept her dental practice running. She graduated from Duke. She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth. She was honored by her dental school as their most outstanding alumna of the last decade. She built a life and a man who wouldn't pay the mortgage or the bills, who spent the horseback riding money on a handgun, who locked himself in the office with the bottles, who had been accused by two women years earlier of sexual assault and had never had to answer for it. That is the man she was trying to exit. She didn't make it out.

16:08 Serena Fairfax ran a family dentistry practice. She was forty nine years old. She had two children who will now grow up without either of their parents. Her son Cameron called nine one one in the middle of the night and tried to describe to a stranger what he was looking at in his own basement. Her daughter Karris is fourteen. Someone should have said something a long time ago. Maybe somebody did. Maybe the people who knew what was going on behind that door tried and he didn't hear it, and she couldn't get out. I don't know. I am not in that house. What I do know is that when the system finally started to force an accounting, the mortgage default, the divorce filing, the court date next week, the deadline to leave, the response from Justin Fairfax was to go to the basement with a gun. Accountability doesn't have a legal department. We are keeping Cameron and Kars Fairfax in our thoughts today. They are sixteen and fourteen years old, and they are grieving two parents at once.

17:06 By every account we have, their mother was a woman of accomplishment and warmth. Her community is going to feel that loss for a long time. Serena Fairfax dentist, mother forty nine years old, say her name. Tonight at midnight, Eastern Peacock drops the fourth and final episode of a documentary called The Gilgo Beach Killer House of Secrets. We have talked about Rex Heyerman on this show many times. Longtime listeners know the arc Manhattan architect, suburban husband father arrested in July twenty twenty three, charged with killing seven women working as escorts between nineteen ninety three and twenty ten.

17:56 He held out for almost two years. He fought, he played not guilty. His lawyers argued the DNA was junk science, and on April eighth of this month, in a Suffolk County courtroom, he stood up and pled guilty to all seven murders, and he admitted to an eighth, a woman named Karen Virgatta, who he had not been formally charged with. Killing eight women, all of them strangled, many of them dismembered. There remain scattered along the remote stretches of the Long Island coastline that gave this case its name. We have said their names on this show. Melissa Barthelemy Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Maureen Brainerd Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack, Sandra Castillia, Karen Virgatta. We are gonna say them again today, because that is how this show works. The documentary airing tonight gives you something the courtroom did not. It gives you the inside of the house on First Avenue in Massapequa Park, where Rex Heyerman lived for almost three decades with his wife, Masa Ellerup and their two children. It gives you her daughter, Victoria.

19:05 It gives you her steps on Christopher Sheridan. It gives you the rooms and the locks in the basement, and in the final episode, it gives you a conversation that I cannot stop thinking about. At some point after Houyerman's arrest, Asa Ellup sat down with her husband, the man she had been married to for twenty seven years, the father of her children, the man she had built a suburban life with, and she asked him directly whether the allegations were true. She did it in a specific way. She didn't call him by his first name. She didn't call him honey. She called him mister Hoyerman. She addressed him like a stranger, because she had apparently decided that was the only way she could get through the conversation. She said, in her own words to her lawyer afterward, quote, so, mister Hoyerman, I understand that you are confessing to me on these murders. Can you please please tell me how many of these women did you kill? He said eight.

20:05 She asked him if any of them were killed inside their home. He said, yes, seven of the eight, all except one, he said, they were killed in his room downstairs, the basement room that the documentary shows you, the one prosecutors have been describing in filings for two years, and she asked him whether he hesitated when he answered, and she said, no, he just told me the answer. Now, I want to give you the moment inside that moment, because it's the thing I think will end up being the defining image of the finale. When she called him, mister Hoyerman the cold formal address, he answered her in kind. He said, oh, are we formal now, missus ellup? Think about that, a man who has just admitted to his wife of nearly three decades that he killed seven women in the basement of their family home is cracking a bit of a joke about her tone. Oh are we formal now? Of course he did, because and this is the hardest part, the part that asa Elera herself is trying to articulate. The person in the room with her having this conversation was the wreck she knew. She says.

21:15 When he started talking, it started feeling like that's the rex I know. But I didn't want to see that one. I wanted to see the one I needed to see. That is not a woman in denial. That is a woman telling you in real time that the ordinary husband she lived with and the suburban serial killer were the same man, and she has to carry that for the rest of her life. Her lawyer says she put up a wall in the conversation in order to get through it. That was the only way she could sit across from him and hear what he was telling her. Prosecutors have confirmed that Asa Ellerup and the children were out of town every single time one of these murders occurred. She did not know. She could not have known. The Suffolk County DA has said so publicly. But she now has to reconcile the fact that she was out of town so that he could be home alone to do this, and he chose the basement of her house to do it in, and he did it seven times. And the man she had dinner with on the other side of those weekends was the same man who was killing women downstairs while she was gone. There is a playbook for what Rex Hoyerman did. You wait for the family to leave, You use the absence, you use the cover. You stand in your kitchen on Sunday morning and make pancakes for your children. Because the structure of being a suburban father is the best possible camouflage for what you are. The documentary is going to show you tonight what that camouflage looks like from the inside, from the perspective of the person whose house it was. Hoyerman is scheduled for sentencing on June seventeenth. He faces up to seven consecutive life sentences.

22:49 He will die in a prison cell. His lawyer has said he believes Hoyerman may make a statement at sentencing. I'm curious and I suspect you are too. What the man in the basement had has to say when he finally speaks in open court. Melissa Barthelemy Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Maureen Brainerd Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack, Sandra Costilla, Karen Vergatta say their names. That's the show today. Chadwick Willisey is dead. Serena Fairfax is dead. Cameron and Karis Fairfax have no parents. Rex Hoyerman is going to die in a cell, and tonight his ex wife is going to tell you, in her own voice on Peacock what he told her about the basement of their house. Marley Sather, Serena Fairfax, the eight Women of Gilgo Beach. Someone has to say their names. I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been Daily Crime and Justice. Do Better. Disclaimer. This episode of Daily Crime Injustice covers a completed execution, a murder, suicide, and a guilty plea in an ongoing serial murder case.

23:56 Details are drawn from court records, police statements, news reporting, and a documentary airing the same day this episode releases. Some reporting is preliminary and may change. In particular, claims about former Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax's conduct during divorce proceedings come from court filings that a judge noted were undisputed by Fairfax, but those filings are one side of a domestic dispute. It is also not confirmed whether the handgun referenced in the twenty twenty two filing is the same firearm used in the April sixteenth shooting. This program is entertainment and commentary. It is not legal advice. We try to get the facts right. When we don't, we correct it.

24:39 This episode contains discussion of execution, domestic homicide, suicide, and the murder of sex workers. If you or someone you know is in crisis, the nine to eight to eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available in the United States, The National Domestic Violence Hotline is one eight hundred and seven nine nine seven two three three in